I know it flies in the face of web rationalisation; but the only way to get better at building websites is to build websites.

I'm unquestionably better at this job than I was when I started a couple of years ago. I learn something with every new project, and every fresh set of client requirements. I always consciously try to add something new and innovative - for me, or for government, or for WordPress - into every build. If it works, I'll do it again next time; if not, I'll certainly be wiser for trying.

If you adhere to the 'only one website per government department' rule, that would mean your team is only building one website every 3-5 years, or maybe even more. No opportunity to practice or experiment in between monster projects; and the experience of 'last time' will, in all likelihood, be irrelevant. Any mistakes you make, you'll be stuck with for the v-e-r-y long term.

The BBC's new iPlayer 'app' for the Wii is now available for download: and it has the potential to do amazing things to UK viewing habits.

Thus far, if you wanted to watch iPlayer via your Nintendo Wii (and your wireless broadband connection), there was a web-based interface, not dissimilar to iplayer/bigscreen - which was fine, but not without its issues. Like for example, if you wanted to watch full-screen - which, of course, you would - you had to do a manual zoom-in on the playback window, and even then, it wasn't quite right. Then came the upgrade to the Wii's web browser... and iPlayer broke, for some reason.

Instead, there's now a free iPlayer 'channel' available for download from the console's Wii Shop. The interface is much the same: which, to be honest, is a bit disappointing. I can appreciate the desire to maintain consistency across all broadcast platforms, but the Wii could surely do a lot more than others. But it works fine, so no real complaints.

The TV playback? Fantastic. Better image quality than before (I think): not as good as a Sky Digital signal, but certainly good enough. Seems more reliable playback too. And yes, hurrah, proper full-screen viewing.

Of course, the Wii version falls a bit behind the Virgin Media cable version, which already boasts HD-quality. But it's worth noting how big a success iPlayer has been on cable; Virgin credited its arrival as being 'a real tipping point in consumer understanding of on-demand'. I wonder if the same can happen with the Wii (and other games consoles) as platforms for delivering online content?

It didn't take a lot of guesswork to find the site, at act.libdems.org.uk: and it turns out, it's just a Ning site with paid-for options to use your own domain name, remove any mention of Ning, and hide third-party adverts.

Here's the video intro to what it can do:

It's certainly a cost-effective solution: those 'pro' options are costing them £33/month at a guess, and make for a pretty rich social network. Ning also implements the OpenSocial protocols, so in theory there are ways to access and play with the underlying data - although they don't make it easy, at first glance. So although it's the cheap option, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad one.

But they may hit problems due to the inability to really customise the platform. Where you'd love to offer dropdown lists, for example a list of Westminster constituencies for event locations, all you get is a free text field for location: and searching isn't all that clever, so you'll need a lot of discipline to ensure consistent tagging.

Of course, it looks like what it is: a generic Ning site with a few LibDem logos stuck on it. So in that sense, it doesn't measure up to the Tories' custom-built MyConservatives.com. But if the site connects people, and those people go out and do things, it will have served its purpose, for a tiny amount of money.

(I wasn't present to hear Iain Dale declare the site 'one of the best political websites [he'd] ever seen', but I am assured it's an accurate transcription - from his opening remarks at a LibDem Conference fringe meeting, I'm told.)

Mark's analysis yields one interesting result for anyone in political social media: despite being exactly the same mechanism, and often identical content, there's a marked preference for 'blog' content as opposed to the more conventional 'news releases'. Mark has crunched the numbers, but actually, it's obvious from even the briefest glance: the blog posts get comments, the news releases (almost) never do.

But here's my favourite fact about the relaunch. One of Lynne's core campaigning messages is how she stands up to the Labour-dominated Haringey council. And if you search Google for 'haringey council', Lynne's automated 'issue page' (with its far-from-flattering meta description) is result no5 behind the council itself (twice), Directgov and Wikipedia. I'm quite pleased with that; they probably aren't.

The Prime Minister and Communities Secretary John Denham will today announce that the public will have more access to Ordnance Survey maps from next year, as part of a Government drive to open up data to improve transparency. Speaking at a seminar on Smarter Government in Downing Street ... the Prime Minister will set out how the Government and Ordnance Survey, Great Britain's national mapping agency, will open up its data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information. The Government will consult on proposals to make data from Ordnance Survey freely available so it can be used for digital innovation and to support democratic accountability.

See that? Lots of definite statements, of how they will do this, will do that. Well, hold your horses. Ordnance Survey's rather brief press release is slightly more defensive, and markedly less excitable:

The Prime Minister has today announced that the public and others will have greater access to a range [of?] Ordnance Survey data from next year, as part of a Government drive to open up data to improve efficiency and transparency. The detail of this is still being worked through and a formal consultation period will begin in December to look at how these changes will be implemented.

So whilst DCLG see it as a chance to crowdsource some cool stuff, OS frame it purely in fairly boring accountant-bureaucrat terms. Hmm.

Of course it's welcome news, but there's a long, long way to go yet - and not much time to do it. With a general election on the horizon, boundaries absolutely must be freed - as quickly as possible, and in formats which will be most useful to the digital innovators. (Basically, that means dead easy integration with Google Maps.)

Oh, and let's not get carried away about 'postcode areas'. They aren't Ordnance Survey's to free, are they?

If the many series of Have I Got News For You have taught us anything, it's that if a joke is topical, it doesn't actually have to be funny.

With that in mind, here's Labour's latest online campaigning masterstroke. A badly Photoshopped picture of the two senior Opposition politicians, mocked up to look like John and Edward off the X-Factor, slapped on a page on their website. No attempt to make a deeper political point; just a stupid joke. Childish, amateur, pathetic. But it made me smile. And now I'm writing about it here.

It's worked.

But that March launch date? As you may have noticed, there's going to have to be a general election in the first half of next year. There are local elections scheduled for 6 May, making it the obvious date to pick for a national poll; although it could be as late as 3 June, and there have been rumours of a date as early as 25 March.

Check your calendars, folks: we're now into territory where the election date is a factor in even medium-sized web projects. The Cabinet Office's election guidance isn't specific about website redesigns, but the thrust of all their advice is to reduce communication activity to a bare minimum during the 'purdah' period immediately before polling day. So in the admittedly unlikely event of them calling the election for March, the BIS Sitecore site might have to be mothballed until after Election Day - even if it's bang on schedule. And then you're into awkward questions as to whether the behemothic BIS would survive in its current form. It might never see the light of day..?

8.20 The Committee believes that effective engagement between an MP and his or her constituents is of the utmost importance, particularly in the wake of recent events. The Committee’s survey research shows that the public expect MPs to keep in touch with what they think is important and to explain their actions and decisions.

8.21 However, with some commendable exceptions, the evidence that the communications allowance has really succeeded in promoting more effective engagement is very limited, even allowing for the relatively short time since its introduction. There is much more evidence of it being used in ways that are essentially party political or have more to do with self-promotion. It is also difficult to police.

8.22 For these reasons, the Committee has concluded that the allowance should be abolished.

It'll only save between £2m (assuming some of the expenditure finds its way into other allowances) and £5m, a relatively minor sum. But I'm not at all surprised to read:

The Committee has been shown some good examples of the communications allowance being used  to engage with constituents in ways which appear to be both valuable and appropriate. However, the Committee has seen much more evidence of the allowance being used to fund material which is largely self-promotional, containing little information about local issues but a large number of photographs of the MP, or which mainly recites party lines.

I recently received a richly-designed mailing from my own Conservative MP. Lots of colour photos. Official Conservative colours and fonts. It may not have mentioned the word Conservative, but there was no doubt which party it came from. If it's the last one I receive... actually, let me rephrase that. If it's the last one I pay for myself, I won't be sorry.

The lesson here, surely, is that you can't sensibly separate party politics and Westminster business. I'm glad the Committee recognises this. As I've written here before (eg around McBride), the implications of such a conclusion go well beyond the few million quid we'll all save.

PS: The Committee also appears to have added a new definition of greater London, based on a 'reasonable commuting distance'. It calls for the new independent regulator to draw up a list of constituencies to add to those which meet the current rule: 'constituencies wholly within 20 miles of Westminster'. The BBC specifically names Reigate, Slough, Runnymede and Weighbridge, St Albans, Welwyn and Hatfield, Epping Forest, Sevenoaks, Maidenhead, Broxbourne, Mole Valley, Windsor and Dartford.

Basically, it's an automated 'word cloud' generator for blogs: think 'Twitter trending' for a defined collection of RSS sources. Every few minutes, it pulls in the latest posts from Iain Dale's Top 100 political blogs (although it could be any folder you care to share in Google Reader), and looks for the most popular words in article headlines and opening sentences. It joins up pairs of words likely to go together, such as people's names, based on a manually-maintained list stored in a plain text file. It removes any words it finds in a 300-strong list of 'stopwords'; then sorts the remainder in order of popularity. Finally there's some cheeky string manipulation to apply CSS classes to the words in the 'cloud', including the calling-in of little icons where available. It's all been built for flexibility (maximum number of posts to review, over how many hours, etc) and easy maintenance. And I'm really quite pleased with it so far.

I took this screenshot a few minutes ago: you can see how the hot news topics jump out at you.

But then what? In my current test build, the words are all clickable - and act as a show/hide toggle for a long aggregated list of posts. So you click 'david cameron' and you see all posts whose headline or opening sentences contain the specific phrase 'david cameron'. It's not bad, but I don't yet feel it's the right end result. Ideas welcome!

For the technically minded: I'm doing it all in PHP, pulling feeds in from Google Reader and processing them using SimplePie, before getting crazy with some monster arrays. On my local machine, it takes about 5 seconds to process each cloud, based on around 100 posts each time: maybe it could be faster, but it doesn't need to be. In production, I'd probably have it running every 5-10 minutes on a cron, generating a static HTML chunk to be called in via an include. I did initially try building it in javascript, but processing times didn't look promising.

There are quite a few surprises in the new Liberal Democrats website, launched today. First of all, and quite a relief, is that it's not predominantly yellow / gold / orange for once. Secondly, curiously, is that it's been built - and is apparently hosted - in Belfast. We'll come back to that in a moment.

I rather liked the old LibDem site: it was a bit cold, and a bit ugly, but I felt it laid the groundwork for some interesting things going forward. For its replacement, more effort has clearly been put into the aesthetics, hitting you with a big and brutal image carousel at the top of the homepage. Unfortunately, it seems to have come at the expense of the features which made the old site interesting. Gone (as far as I can tell) is the collection of data from external sources such as MPs' blogs, TheyWorkForYou, or Flock Together; and you'll need to dig into the 'media centre' to find any outbound RSS - no autodiscovery on the homepage, tsk tsk.

Mark Pack recently wrote a spot-on piece about reviewing political websites, stating that you should only judge them on whether they meet the objectives they set for themselves. So how does this one measure up? Well, according to the site, here's what the party stands for:

If you want things to be different, really different, choose the party that is different - the Liberal Democrats. There is hope for a different future, a different way of doing things in Britain, if we're brave enough to make a fresh start.  Change for real, change for good.

Does the website communicate these values? Is it 'really different', 'brave', 'a fresh start'? Hand on heart, I can't say that it is. The design feels dated, and whilst it's built around a solid enough core structure, there's nothing really inspiring. In fact, as redesigns go, it's rather conservative (small 'c').

And then there's the Northern Ireland thing. On the homepage, there's a map of the British Isles (plural) highlighting the site's postcode search function: rather curious for a party which doesn't actually stand (directly) in Northern Ireland, never mind the Republic. And if you enter a Northern Ireland postcode into the search box, it responds with a (polite) error message. Yet there's an explicit reference to 'N Ireland' in the footer, which links directly to their sister Alliance Party's site - without obvious reciprocity. Er...? Now I admit, I'm from that part of the world, I notice these things - but I'd have thought their Belfast-based design agency would have too. (Of course, it's quite a coup for a Belfast agency to win the contract for a party which has barely a token official presence locally.)

The LibDems have a lot of work to do presentationally over the next six months. They need to differentiate themselves positively from the competition, in a climate where 'they're all as bad as each other' (regardless of what the evidence says). They need to manage the transition from 'rural' to 'urban', as the Tories reclaim seats they'd lost, and Labour lose seats they've held. They need to claim the mantle of 'the party of real change' (although that's going to be a tall order). And like all parties, they need to enthuse their supporter base. And I'm afraid this isn't the website to do any of that.

Update: The party's marketing chief, David Loxton explains the changes in a post at Lib Dem Voice. The primary objective seems to have been simplification - and I'd agree, it probably achieves that, although I stand by my comments last night about it failing to match the party's stated core values. The prospect of 'new social action network site' sounds interesting though, and not a million miles away from MyConservatives.com.